Month

May 2013

Often, someone will sit down across from me and ask a seemingly simple question.

“What about my job?” He or she will say.

“What about it?” I will respond.

“Well, how’s it gonna go?” They will say.

“Well, how do you want it to go?”

I’m not being difficult. I genuinely want to find out – what does this person really want to know? Do they like their job and want to keep it? Or do they hate their job and want to get a new one?

What’s most interesting to me is not that people aren’t specific when they ask me a question. It’s that, generally, even by the time they’ve made an appointment with me, they haven’t given much thought to what they really want or need to know.

What they do know is that something is nagging at them, or that an uncomfortable situation has gotten to a point where they can’t ignore it anymore — and they need to do something about it. They need to get clear. Ironically, what people often need to get most clear about are the questions themselves.

What questions are trying to ask themselves in your life? What vague, still unexpressed feeling, is nagging at you? And how could you put that nagging feeling into words?

In my practice, I often encounter people who channel angels, talk to guides, communicate with plant spirits and have a variety of other magical seeming gifts to which I can lay no claim. For many years, however, I have been blessed with what I call The-Guardian-of The-Right-Thing-At-The-Right-Time.

Whether it’s at the library, a store, or in my own home, at key moments of decision or change, I am frequently presented with EXACTLY the right piece of information at EXACTLY the right moment. Most recently, while sorting through a box in my kids’ closet, I unearthed a Caroline Myss CD called Your Primal Nature: Connecting With The Power Of The Earth.

In this blog – and in my own life – I’ve been struggling with an inquiry into courage: where it comes from, how it is cultivated and how it can be instilled into the lives of my clients, my readers and my self so that we can all lead lives of greater intuition, truth and purpose.

On Your Primal Nature, Myss suggests that – because the instructions of intuition can seem so daunting and ridiculously risky – we MUST connect with our tribe and we MUST connect with the earth in order to enact those instructions.

It is only through GROUNDING ourselves in those relationships – with our tribe and with the planet – that we can experience the fearlessness that comes with feeling SAFE and which is a necessary component of living in alignment with one’s truth.

Without that sense of safety and security that comes from knowing your place – in the tribe and in the physical world – very little is possible in the way of change or transformation, no matter how badly we want it.

In one way or another, I’d been saying the same thing to my clients for quite some time, but until I heard Myss put it so plainly, it hadn’t really clicked.

Without love – truly loving and being loved – and without feeling at home in the world – whether it’s the garden, the woods, the ocean or the desert – we can only fantasize about living peacefully in alignment with higher instructions and inner wisdom. Otherwise, we are bound to terrify ourselves and recoil from our own gifts, in fear of what people will think and all that we have to lose.

So, call someone and feel the love. Go outside and feel the peace. And then take one of those small risks so necessary to living your truth: knowing a little more that you belong with your tribe and in your world.

“Over centuries, a persistent drop of water will drill holes in the hardest of rocks. In the same way, a persistent, consistent approach to your problem will slowly yield progress over time.” – HEXAGRAM 57*

“Sometimes allowing a collapse is the only way to move ahead.” – HEXAGRAM 23*

Where in your life is impatience sabotaging your best efforts?

Where are you so uncomfortable that you’re more focused on escaping your situation through daydreams or addictions than on making incremental but lasting improvements?

And where have you given all you can give until you can’t give any more?

One of the things I love most about my work is being able to observe eternal principles of change and transformation play themselves out in my own and my clients’ lives.

Persistence is one such principle.

Without it, we give up too soon . Without it, we may prematurely declare defeat. Without persistence, the impossible remains just that. There is nothing worth doing, that does not demand some degree of persistence.

And yet sometimes it seems wisest – feels most expedient – to let go.

So when do we know the difference? When is it time for Hexagram 57 and when is it time to throw in the towel?

It is during such moments of choice that divination can be most valuable. Sometimes you have to know whether this is the end of the line or just a bump in the road – and free yourself from the anxiety of not knowing if you’re even on the right path anymore.